Extracting a section...
On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Keith Hudson wrote:
> But most of the populations of advanced countries are declining
> anyway. For the past two generations, ever since the post-WWII
> baby-bulge, families have decreased to much less than replacement
> sizes. Within two generations from now, populations will be halved;
> within three generations, populations will be less than a quarter;
> within four generations there'll only be remnants. But, with any luck,
> the bulk of the population (what I term the 80-class) will decline
> pari passu with the onslaught of the robot. Mismatches along the way
> will have to be made up with welfare payments from governments.
I disagree entirely. No country has yet seen an actual decline in
population, that I am aware. Certainly lots of regions have, but the
national totals still hover at manifestly unsustainable numbers, ...and
everybody knows it. Talk to people. Everyone I talk to is just waiting
for the other shoe to drop. On a discussion in a random web forum the
other day, someone asked "How many are we?", and the unchallenged answer
came immediately: "Too many!" People aren't stupid, they know we're
courting catastrophe, and they aren't going to breed recklessly in that
situation. Everyone has seen the growth curves, they know the numbers,
and they can see that this sort of thing doesn't usually end well.
However, it is a matter of habituation. People will tend to estimate
that a sane population ought to feel like what it was like back when
they were small children, and so each generation will have a different
sense of what is excess. So, what I expect to happen is at some point
there will be a slight decline in populations which will show up at the
whole country, and then the whole world, level. This will cause a huge
mental sigh of relief, followed shortly by a tiny uptick in the birth
rate, so that the total population drop will not amount to more than ten
or perhaps fifteen percent below maximum before it levels off, assuming
that the long term pathologies to the environment due to human
overburden have not yet ripened to the point of inflicting overt impact
on our numbers.
At this point, I expect that those long term pathologies are going to
play the determining role. Each different, unforeseen, presenting a new
and different assault which will hack at some portion of the population.
Some will be simply the stochastic inevitability of epidemics. You keep
a homogeneous population at unsustainable density long enough, and it
will be vulnerable to pathogenic culls, not all of which will be
controllable by our medical technology. Again, the longer the time
scale, the more likely something too tricky to solve will come along.
The situation essentially selects for it. Other assaults will arise
from our corruption of the un- or underacknowledged necessities of
our environment, air water, soil, healthy bacterial populations, etc.
I don't expect these events to occur quickly, nor do I expect things
like warfare to substantially affect the population total. I do expect
that life will go through a fairly long period where we will experience
as a planetary species a pretty wretched time, and how long and how bad
it will be will be chiefly dependent on how long it takes us to
acknowledge the superiority of cooperation over individual struggle. It
may be that the population takes a massive dive due to a particularly
vicious assault of the type mentioned above, but certainly not due to a
massive social neglect of breeding. Barring such a hit, I expect the
total population to subside slowly as reality sets in. Where it finally
settles will be contingent on how our technology solves each challenge
I've outlined above, including those just sketched vaguely. In the
shorter medium term of the next 3-400 years, I expect a stepwise
downward trend as apparently viable population levels prove
unsustainable, due to inability to manage the challenges noted above,
and population reduction is recognized as the only available solution.
It may be that in a half a millennium or so we will decide that the
planet cannot sustain more than 2.5 or 3 billion, or we may devise ways
of supporting 8 or 12, or even 30, but with extraordinary technological
intervention and considerable energy flows onto and off the planet.
At any rate, at each stage along the way, people will tend to breed to
the point of filling up the planet to the maximum regarded as viable,
and I expect there will be a permanent struggle to hold the numbers to
what is seen as desireable at any time. At any time ahead, with the
planet at what is then generally perceived as a safe and manageable
population level, there will never be a problem keeping the population
level up, only with keeping it down, and the latter problem may
result in a permanent undercurrent of nastiness. It would seem unlikely
that managing population numbers would not be combined with some form
of eugenic practice in such a world. Each child born would be expected
to have something about it which justified its right to life in place
of others whose would-be parents were thwarted.
-Pete
On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Keith Hudson wrote:
> The article that Sally referred us to ("Skilled Work, Without the Worker",
> John Markoff, NYT, 19 August 12) was eloquent on job destruction but only
> hinted at another, equally significant by-product of the increasing use of
> robotics. This is that robots are becoming increasingly
versatile. If suitably
> programmed, they can be instantly switched from one job to
another. (Mention
> was made of one robot which could switch between four distinctly different
> operations.) Items can be custom-made. The mass consumer goods and services
> market will also be destroyed in due course.
>
> Which, from the point of view of the very rich and the supportive
specialisms
> around them (what I call the 20-class), is just as well. Mass production of
> standard goods and services is becoming increasingly risky. Competition
> between ever-larger corporations in every field is not only
becoming fiercer,
> profit margins (the future source of investment finance) are becoming
> narrower. The Apple iPhone4S might well have a profit margin of
50% or so at
> the present time but, within five years or so, we can be certain that
> competition from Samsung, Matsushita, Google and others will drive it well
> below 10%, perhaps nearer to the 1-2% profit margins of most
personal computer
> manufacturers. Given an innovative tweak by another manufacturer to its own
> smartphone and Apple could easily go out of existence, much as
threatens Nokia
> at the present time.
>
> Being a more mature industry, what's happening to cars at the
present time is
> an even more instructive pointer to the future. On the one hand,
we have the
> mass production of cars by no more than about a dozen large
manufacturers in
> the world with, at best, only modest profit margins of around 5-7%, more
> usually 2-3%, and sometimes 0% (being kept alive by government
subsidies). On
> the other hand, we have the recent burgeoning of many luxury types of cars
> (for the 20-class) which are either brand new in design (e.g.
Tesla, McLaren)
> or are revivals of some of the hand-made brands of the past (e.g. Porsche,
> Aston Martin). They are made in surgically clean workshops with
robots dancing
> up and down the line and with hardly a worker to be seen. There
are more than
> 20 luxury car-makers already and undoubtedly there'll be many
more. But they
> won't be competing on price, only on customers' personal tastes. Later,
> they'll be competing on the basis of how versatile their robots can be
> programmed, even down to making customers' own designs as well as their own
> brand.
>
> One question will be raised immediately: "If robots are to take over, and
> there's to be no future for mass production then there'll be no future for
> jobs for most of the population." Exactly! But most of the populations of
> advanced countries are declining anyway. For the past two generations, ever
> since the post-WWII baby-bulge, families have decreased to much less than
> replacement sizes. Within two generations from now, populations will be
> halved; within three generations, populations will be less than a quarter;
> within four generations there'll only be remnants. But, with any luck, the
> bulk of the population (what I term the 80-class) will decline
pari passu with
> the onslaught of the robot. Mismatches along the way will have to
be made up
> with welfare payments from governments.
>
> The other questions will be: "If there's no labour (80-class) for
the 20-class
> to exploit where will profits (for future investment) come from?
How will an
> economy exist at all?" The answer is that economic development
has never come
> from labour as such. Slave labour never gave way to paid labour
solely because
> of the sentiments of William Wilberforce or the Quakers, but because the
> energy of paid labour was more efficient than slave labour. Paid labour is
> giving way to robotics because the energy of robots is more efficiently
> expended than the muscular (or mental) energy of the routine jobs
of humans.
> The future economy of a 20-class is perfectly viable so long as efficiency
> savings are made between one generation of robots and the next.
>
> Keith
>
> Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
>
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